Thank you for your responses. But they seem to (mostly) be opinions, not official Church teaching. I’m not trying to cut down anybody, or to be mean. I just want know if the Church officially considers it a sin not to work. There is so much confusion surrounding Catholic belief, I certainly don’t want to add to it, or to confuse anybody even more.
SOMEONE WROTE: “If parties, fine restaurants, vacation planning, cruises, golf, gardening, workouts, cooking is all that makes up your time, in other words if it’s all about you and your selfish gratifications/interests (did I just describe a majority of retirees?) then this life will be lots of fun in a purposeless kind of way, the next life won’t be so pleasant.”
This doesn’t add up at all. There are plenty of Catholic financial programs that help you PLAN for your retirement. And I very much doubt that God is going to punish you for enjoying your retirement. I just want the official POSITION of the Church on this issue. I just can’t seem to find it.
SOMEONE ELSE WROTE: “(W)e need to work all the time, especially if its the work of God and of his Church.”
Actually, Catholic Answers Apologist Jimmy Akin writes that laboring for the Church, and “good works” in general, do NOT get you into Heaven. Nor does an “insufficient” amount of “good works” keep you OUT of Heaven.
QUOTE: “(T)he thing that gets us to heaven is our receiving and remaining in God’s grace. We receive God’s grace when we turn to him and accept his offer of grace, particularly through the sacraments…Good works are a natural outgrowth of his grace working in our hearts, and he rewards us for cooperating with his grace in doing good works, but the thing that would keep us out of heaven is mortal sin, not having an insufficient number of good works.”
Jimmy Akin covers this more fully in his article, “Fear of Going to Hell,” written in response to someone worried about how many “good works” were necessary to enter Heaven. It can be read here:
jimmyakin.org/2006/01/fear_of_going_t.html
So that takes care of the “good works” argument. We don’t have to work for the Church (volunteering at Mass, volunteering at the parish soup kitchen, whatever,) to get into Heaven. Plenty of Catholics live alone, do no real “good works” to speak of, and are pretty solitary. And the Church has NEVER declared such people to be on the way to Hell.
SOMEONE WROTE: “You shouldn’t be lazy, but that doesn’t mean you have to work until you die either.”
I wonder. The way a lot of Catholics talk about work, it almost sounds like you are required to find work – ANY work, no matter what it is - or you will be in mortal sin! It doesn’t matter if the work benefits anyone or not. It just has to be WORK. This sounds suspiciously like the Protestant work ethic, to me. As long as you’re doing something difficult, then it must be worthwhile.
Catholic Philosopher Josef Pieper, in his book “Leisure, the Basis of Culture,” says the exact opposite of this:
“In a key phrase, Pieper says that “man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.” Pieper quotes St. Thomas Aquinas: “The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than the difficult.””
Pieper argues, as Thomas Aquinas does, that the laziest people in the world often WORK THE HARDEST. Workaholics, who work all the time, often do so just to KILL TIME. This is really just another form of extreme LAZINESS, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, and it constitutes a violation of the third commandment, which commands us to be able to enjoy leisure.
Saint Thomas defines Leisure itself not as idleness, but as the work of contemplation, the effortless receiving of wisdom and knowledge. Josef Pieper says in his book that laziness (acedia) is defined by the Church as an actual INABILITY TO ENJOY LEISURE. Thomas Aquinas says that people who work hard all the time are often guilty of the deadly sin of sloth (acedia), in that all they do is work. They fill up their meaningless time with endless, endless, purposeless work. If they are not toiling away at something, they feel that something must be wrong with them. Our society today seems to be mostly filled with lazy, listless workaholics, who cannot enjoy beauty or play or contemplation at all.
Pieper says:
“Like all of the seven deadly sins, acedia awaits its opportunity to seduce human beings. The noon-day demon prowls everywhere in a workaholic society that knows only work and idleness and preys upon the tired, the bored and the apathetic who lack the time, the energy and the spirit to look above, to lift their hearts, and to fall in love with life again and again in the revel of mirthful play…Leisure always liberates man from enslavement to work and releases him from the bondage to servile activities like earning money in order to contemplate the true, the good, and the beautiful."
(continued) "A jaded, listless world debilitated by work, worry and debt and indoctrinated with the ideas of the noon-day demon (“Let both man and woman work,” “Let them think they need more things,” and “Let them have no time except to eat and sleep”) needs this “surge of new life” (leisure) again and again to resist the wiles of the deadly sin of acedia.”
So according to all this, it is actually a DEADLY SIN to always have some type of work to fill up the time. The message seems to be that a world WITHOUT work would be the ideal, and no sin at all. (Leisure, as Thomas Aquinas points out, is not idleness, but the MOST EFFORTLESS, MEANINGFUL WORK IN THE WORLD - the contemplation of beauty, life and everything.)
This makes total sense, morally speaking. And I can’t find anything in all Catholic theology against it. I just wish I could find some official Church documentation that AGREES with all this. Can anyone help me here?
